New young crop of designers rise to the top in this year’s Chelsea Flower Show

A pair of twentysomething garden designers from London’s commuter belt stormed the Chelsea Flower Show today with a “Best in Show” award in their first year of competition.

Tom Prince and Alex Frazier, both 28, won the top honour in the “Fresh Garden” category for smaller designs at the world’s leading horticultural event. They were awarded the accolade for their Mind’s Eye Garden for the RNIB charity for the blind.

It came in a year widely seen as a “changing of the old guard” at Chelsea, with more rookie names than ever before responsible for show gardens, including 23-year-old David Rich, the youngest ever designer on the prestigious Main Avenue. Hugo Bugg, 27, also broke records by becoming the youngest winner of a Show Garden gold medal for his Waterscape Garden for Royal Bank of Canada.

Mr Prince and Mr Frazier, childhood friends from Guildford in Surrey and born within two days of each other, impressed the judges with their “multi-sensory” garden visited yesterday by model Jerry Hall and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.

Mr Prince said: “I’m speechless, it’s unbelievable, I was playing it all down yesterday, I wasn’t expecting anything. This morning I got a call from Alex saying, ‘It’s gold... it’s gold!’, and then when I came round the corner there were all these TV crews. I wanted to celebrate with a champagne breakfast but I’ve got a lot of watering to do first.”

Chelsea Flower Show 2014 - in pictures

Chelsea Flower Show 2014 - in pictures

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Chelsea Flower Show

Visitors admire the plants on display in The Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show

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Chelsea Flower Show

Harriet Corbett 16 from Somerset, enjoys the flowers on her first ever visit to the show Picture: Alex Lentati

Mr Prince said he stumbled into landscape gardening after a career in the law fizzled out. Mr Frazier said: “It’s dream world.”

The pair, who describe their relationship as “love-hate”, plan to design a full-scale show garden next year.

Another gold medal winner in the Fresh category was Jo Thompson, who based her design on a corner of a typical London square. She said: “I’m half-Italian and in Italy every village, town or city has its own piazza where people can go to keep connected. We need that in London so even if you’ve only got a tiny flat you’ve got an outside space.”

Overall there were six golds in the Show Garden category, down from nine in 2013 and 2012. The Best in Show award went to Luciano Giubbilei for his Laurent-Perrier garden.

The fall in the number of golds follows the introduction of a new points-based judging system following criticism that it was becoming too easy to win gold.

But RHS judge James Alexander-Sinclair said there had been no deliberate decision to toughen the criteria.

He said: “Because there is no fixed number you can never predict how many golds there are going to be. Our job is to promote the best garden design in the world and if we started to hand out golds like stickers at a primary school egg-and-spoon race we would quickly lose credibility.”